[Ns-developers] ns-3 and future development

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi all,

Back in september and october, I looked at the ways in which I could
evolve ns-2 into something more fancy and useful. Unfortunately, I have
hit some problems harder than I could solve (most of these involve the
ns-2 addressing scheme) so I decided to investigate the idea of starting
from scratch and maybe port incrementally various ns-2 models to a new
simulation core.

Thus, I started writing a new simulation core and implemented a bunch of
models to test out various API solutions. I settled for an ipv4/udp
model with a port of the bsd4.4 tcp stack and a simple ethernet-line
physical interface. So far, I am convinced that the core of the
simulator is sound and its API solid. While the above-mentionned models
work on top of my current Packet-like API, I am not totally happy with
them and I am still investigating radically different Packet-type APIs
which would make supporting emulation vastly easier.

The current code is available under the GPL from this small webpage:
http://spoutnik.inria.fr/yans

The last release version (0.3) contains a doc/yans.html file which
documents my design objectives and the APIs I consider stable (that is,
for now, the Simulator class). The TCP module is not included for
licensing reasons (it is BSD-licensed while the rest of the code is pure
GPLv2).

I hope to be able to propose a radically different Packet-type API in
the next version in 1 or 2 weeks from now. Hopefully, once this is done,
I will be able to investigate other more interesting problems such as:
  - emulation support
  - part of the parallelisation problems

Comments are welcome :)

regards,
Mathieu
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